Specialized Writer’s Tools for Open Office
The free Open Office suite can now be dressed up with a bunch of tools designed especially for writers, offering some tricks not readily available anywhere else. This extension is aptly called Writer’s Tools, now in version 0.9.1, but still in development with new refinements announced periodically.
Here are some of the extension features, as described at the tool’s download site:
- Lookup Tool allows you to lookup the currently selected word in several online references, including Cambridge Dictionaries, WordNet, and Google Define.
- Google Translate allows users to quickly translate selected text fragments between different languages using the Google Translate service.
- Show on the Map tool allows you to select a city, a street name, or a postal code and map it using Google Maps.
- Email Backup can be used to quickly send a backup copy of the currently opened document to a specified email address.
- Multi-format Backup macro saves the currently opened Writer document in the Word, RTF, and TXT formats. The backup files are stored in a separate folder with a date stamp. On Linux, the macro also archives the resulting folder using the tar utility. On Windows, there is an option to use the 7-zip compression tool.
- Remote Backup allows you to quickly save a backup copy of the current document on a FTP server.
- Wikify Word tool links the selected word in the current document to the created on the fly page. For example, if the word “Monkey” is selected, the macro automatically links it to the created Monkey.odt document.
- Start/Stop Timer tool can be used to keep tabs on time spent on the currently opened document and save the time data (the document name, used time, and date) in the accompanying WriterDB database.
- Word Hunt Game is a simple game, where you have to guess the word randomly picked by Writer.
- Word of the Day tool picks and displays a random word and its definition from the from the accompanying WriterDB database. As a writer, you may often come across a new word or an interesting expression. The WriterDB database allows you to store your language findings in one place, while the Word of the Day tool helps you to keep them active in your memory.
- Add to Basket tool designed to quickly add text snippets, links, and notes to the supplied database. You can also categorize and tag the added entries.
- Tasks tool is a no-frills to-do manager that allows you to quickly add, view, and purge tasks.
- Writer Templates is a separate extension that contains an article and a book templates.
That’s an awesome array of tools. I’ve been procrastinating about installing Open Office, but this suite of tools has kicked me into a download. I wish to thank Lifehacker for bringing to me the announcement of Writer’s Tools, along with a screenshot of the extension’s drop-down menu of tools.
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If I didn’t already have a solution in place for all of these features, I might give it a try. OpenOffice is great, and the one feature I find extremely cool in theory is the wikifization of words. But in reality, with the amount of cross referencing I do with stories, I’d hate to have a different .odt file open for each of them. Yikes.